


We are all flesh

by pr_scatterbrain



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Panic At The Disco, The Like, The Young Veins
Genre: Angst, Blasphemy, M/M, Reincarnation, Religious Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The world's ending,” Ryan says when he calls.</p><p>“Yeah,” Spencer agrees. “But it’s doing that all the time.” </p><p>And it is. (The reincarnation au where Spencer was Joan of Arch and Ryan’s Lazarus).</p>
            </blockquote>





	We are all flesh

 

 

“The world's ending,” Ryan says when he calls.

Spencer doesn’t know what times it is or where he is. Underneath him, he hears the road and the engine and knows, despite everything, that he is heading somewhere. On the other end of the line, Ryan repeats himself, sharp and impatient, as if Spencer didn’t listen. (Spencer is always listening, Ryan forgets that). 

“Yeah,” Spencer agrees. “But it’s doing that all the time.” 

And it is. 

 

 

“We were promised salvation,” Ryan says two states later, picking up right where they left off. “And this is what we got.”

He sounds angry. Spencer can hear it in his voice. 

“Who says this isn’t it?” 

Ryan snorts. “The English made you cynical.”

“The English didn’t do that,” Spencer corrects, but not quite. 

Time perhaps made him let go; both of the hurts and of the glories. For they both hurts and glories fade. Everything does given enough distance and space, and he’s been given an abundance of both. 

“I don’t know why I even try,” Ryan snaps, ending the call. 

Spencer doesn’t either. 

Horses and battlefields and fire and a voice whispering through the darkness belong to someone else. Ryan never got that. 

But then again Ryan never really stopped digging.

 

 

The next time Spence hears from, or rather, about Ryan, the tour is over and Spencer is back in LA. (The world is still there, perhaps not whole, but there). Brendon sees him at a restaurant while he and Sarah are on a double date with Shane and Regan. 

“He was very polite,” Brendon comments. 

Spencer doesn’t believe him. 

Brendon laughs. “Okay. He wasn’t rude.” 

That sounds more like it. 

Ryan, of course, doesn’t view it that way. 

“I don’t know how you stand it,” he says when they finally get a chance to catch up in person. 

“Stand what?”

Ryan does not answer. But Spencer didn’t really expect him to; perhaps it was selfish to ask when the answer has always been so obvious. 

Brendon is bright and so new that sometimes Spencer can’t take his eyes off him. So are Dallon and Ian. Shane too. Most of Spencer’s friends are, now that he thinks about it. Other than Pete and the Way’s, Ryan’s the only one like Spencer. Every now and then Spencer does see the occasional familiar faces (well, not faces. Not exactly) in the crowd, but he doesn’t actively search them out. Not like Ryan does. He migrates to those with stories in the dirt under their nails and lives that fold into each other like a shuffled deck of cards. Always has. 

When he was six, he found Spencer - found himself too. In a way, they both did. But only in a way. 

Back then Ryan wore his body as if it was an over due library book. Now it’s an ill fitting suit, the proportions just off in the shoulders and cuffs. He moves as if people can see his ankles when he walks and speaks like he doesn’t care. Perhaps he doesn’t. How would Spencer know? He isn’t like Ryan. But he forgets that occasionally. 

One time, at the cabin he had slipped. But up in the cabin everything seemed to blur. The four of them had spent days drinking and smoking and Spencer doesn’t remember much of it apart from the one time he had fallen asleep by a bonfire and had woken up out of his mind; his mouth tasting like ash and eyes blinded from the smoke. 

Things like that don’t happen often, but once in a while smaller things will catch him up. He’ll use the wrong name, find himself speaking in the wrong language – see people as who they were rather than who they are. The distinction is inconsequential with Ryan. Where in the corner of Spencer’s eye he sees both Z with eye makeup smudged around her face and the wisps of smoke and shadow – the two images flicking back and forth – Ryan sees everything all at once. 

Z sees the world like that too. 

 

 

The first time Z met Spencer, she laughed when Spencer went to introduces himself. 

“Oh honey, it all makes sense now,” she said as if it were a grand secret she’d discovered. “No one could stand in your way back then, why would a few suits be able to stop you this time around?”

Spencer doesn’t quite see it like that but he doesn’t quite get the humor when Ryan and Z pretended to elope. Back on tour and shaken, Spencer looks at the photographs on his smartphone – the shinny new ring on Z’s finger, coy smiles and bruised flowers – and feels something he does not want to feel. Gerard, of course, has kinder words for it. But Gerard would. He swims in them (unlike Pete who often drowns in them). Mikey is more honest. 

“Ryan is stuck on the wrong point,” Mikey says like he knows it for a fact, and maybe he does. But Spencer’s heart feels what it feels. Mikey’s insights can’t change that. 

“No,” Mikey allows. “But that isn’t the point either.”

 

 

It’s been a very long time since anyone has asked Spencer for more than a drum solo, and somehow in that time the past became something that meant more to other people than it ever did to Spencer. But his name is different now. He is too. And even before, he never held onto it the way other people do, the way Ryan still does. Perhaps that’s why they don’t really talk anymore, but Spencer and Mikey still do.

For the most part Spencer tries not to hold it against Ryan. 

 

 

Ryan never liked Mikey. 

Spencer always wondered at that. When they first met, Spencer had not known what to do when Ryan consciously placed himself at arms length from Mikey. It was so at odds with how Spencer found himself falling into Mikey’s sphere again and again. Both of them equally fascinated by how Spencer could wrap his fingers around the entire width of Mikey’s wrist and the way each of their skin tasted after a set. 

Mikey had never been very physical with his body. Maybe it never really felt like his. Or maybe it was just too different to the one he had been given originally. He never quite figured it out. But he liked how it reacted around Spencer; he liked how Spencer made use of it. 

Even now, Spencer knows Mikey still likes it.

“You make me feel so useful,” he muses when they catch up while Spencer’s in NYC doing the Late Night Show. 

“That’s what every guy dreams of hearing,” Spencer tells him. 

Mikey shrugs. “I like feeling useful.”

Spencer likes Mikey. 

 

 

Spencer doesn't know who Mikey once was. 

"I know who he is now," he says when Ryan comments on the matter and Spencer does.

 

 


End file.
